Christmas Decor

I thought I would share a couple of pieces of our extremely minimal Christmas decor around the Hagen household. We don't decorate a lot as we have very little room and the boys are infamous for destroying things.

We do have our Little People Nativity set adorning the fireplace mantle. It's been up since the first Sunday of Advent and we chose not to put baby Jesus nor the three magi in it until the appropriate time (so the boys will add baby Jesus on Christmas morn and we'll add the kings on the Epiphany). We purposely do that to remind us of Jesus' coming. Well, the reason I thought to put the photo was because when John Henry was here yesterday, he looked at me and pointed to the creche and asked in a serious tone, "What happened to Jesus?" Then I explained it all to him, but given that he is only 3 1/2, I'm not sure if he understood the whole story!
Our Christmas tree went up for the second year now (we didn't start putting one up again until Connell was 4 and Liam was 2 for obvious reasons -- well, obvious if you have spent any time around our curious, energetic boys...) So here is the tree. And I have often talked to many of you about how simple we have tried to be in our Christmas and gift giving for the boys' sake. To put it into perspective... this tree has under it everything among the four of us, presents for all the Boyces, presents for Ray's mom and Tom & presents for 4 of the boys' cousins. We already had some Christmas celebrations and so several presents are gone. Santa will bring one thing for each boy as he always does and that will be it.